Swine flu, and other apocalypses that weren’t

While the default mode between my friend and colleague Joe Garofoli is to ignore personal victories and mock each other’s failings, I really liked his story in Sunday’s Chronicle about the swine flu. The article focuses on how the media tends to overreact to health scares and other events, creating a boy-who-cried-wolf effect.

hidalgotexas.com

They’ll be here any day now …

This is nothing new, of course. I stopped trusting adults way back in the late 1970s, after hearing the 47th television news story about the pending attack of the killer bees, which were coming from Mexico and about to arrive any day! I remember sitting on the play structure at Washington Elementary School in Burlingame (go Wildcats!) with several friends, looking toward the horizon for the first wave of bees. We even had an escape plan — run into the bathroom, and cover ourselves with toilet paper like mummies so the stingers couldn’t penetrate. (Interestingly, this was also our plan for fighting Abbott and Costello.)

The bees never did arrive. Because adults are LIARS. I wonder if this generation of kids might think the same thing about the swine flu bug.

I don’t want to minimize the potential impact of this virus, which some of the more sane media types have pointed out hits victims harder than the average flu — and could come back stronger later in the year. For all I know this virus will metamorphosize and take out everyone, leaving me, my wife and Rachel McAdams to repopulate the Earth. But right now, it appears as if the panic was mostly unfounded. This looks to be another apocalyptic event that isn’t.

Below are the five biggest overhyped threats to humanity of the past few decades. Please add your picks in the comments.

5. Hell’s Angels: Based on all of the movies and news stories coming out in the 1970s, these guys were going to steal all of our beer, take our women and before the end of the decade beat every single law abiding citizen over the head with a tire iron. My sole personal experience with a 1 percenter: I had car trouble once near Soledad and a Hell’s Angel stopped to see if I needed help. That idea to provide Hell’s Angels as security for a Rolling Stones concert didn’t go so well, and Hunter S. Thompson received a beat-down. But otherwise biker gangs seem to specialize beating up each other, not so much the public at large. (One more case for bikers not all being a–holes: Sam Elliot in “Mask.”)

4. SARS/Avian flu/Swine flu: Don’t get me wrong. Diseases and viruses suck. But how many more people have died because of drunk drivers in the world over the past two weeks? And how many died from the virus du jour? Reminders to cover your mouth when you sneeze and wash your hands are great, but the public definitely needs to conserve serious panic for something more deserving.

news.com.au

Not a bad guy if you’ve got a flat tire …

3. The Y2K: If you believed the hysteria, midnight on Dec. 31, 1999 was going to make Skynet’s attempt to exterminate the human race look like the Granada Invasion by comparison. (Admit it — you considered smashing your coffee maker just so it wouldn’t turn on you.) I seriously remember making sure I had plenty of bottled water that night. I think, in the end, the only thing I noticed is one of my old Casio watches stopped working.

2. Dungeons and Dragons: At one time or another, just about everything artistic and new has been demonized as the source of exaggerated evil, from the Rolling Stones to video games. But the Dungeons and Dragons fear-mongering of the mid-1980s sticks out, because 1. The argument that D&D resulted in delusional psychotic episodes was based almost entirely on one isolated case (and it turned out to be wrong); and 2. This fear resulted in a craptastic film called “Mazes and Monsters” starring Tom Hanks. There are some excellent YouTube clips, so look for a separate post about that this week.